The ablative case (sometimes abbreviatedabl) is a grammatical case for nouns, pronouns and adjectives in the grammar of various languages; it is sometimes used to express motion away from something, among other uses. The word "ablative" derives from the Latinablatus, the (irregular) perfect passive participle of auferre "to carry away".[1] There is no ablative case in modern Germanic languages such as German, nor in ancient Greek.

Indo-European languages

Latin

The ablative case in Latin (cāsus ablātīvus) appears in various grammatical constructions, including following various prepositions, in an ablative absolute clause, and adverbially. The Latin ablative case was derived[2] from three Proto-Indo-European cases: ablative (from), instrumental (with), and locative (in/at).

Greek

In Ancient Greek, there was no ablative case; some of its functions were taken by the genitive and others by the dative; the genitive had functions belonging to the Proto-Indo-European genitive and ablative cases.[3] The genitive case with the prepositions ἀπό apó "away from" and ἐκ/ἐξ ek/ex "out of" is an example.

German

German does not have an ablative case (but exceptionally, Latin ablative case-forms were used from the 17th to the 19th century after some prepositions, for example after von in von dem Nomine: ablative of the Latin loanword Nomen). Grammarians at that time, such as Justus Georg Schottel, Kaspar von Stieler ("der Spate"), Johann Balthasar von Antesperg and Johann Christoph Gottsched, listed an ablative case (as the sixth case after nominative, genitive, dative, accusative and vocative) for German words. They arbitrarily considered the dative case after some prepositions to be an ablative, as in von dem Mann[e] ("from the man" or "of the man") and mit dem Mann[e] ("with the man"), while they considered the dative case after other prepositions or without a preposition as dem Mann[e] to be a dative.

There is some confusion in German culture about the Latin ablative and the German dative.

Serbo-Croatian

As in Ancient Greek, the functions of the ablative case in the Serbo-Croatian language are performed by the genitive case. Of the three forms of genitive in Serbo-Croatian (partitive, possessive and ablative), the noun in the ablative genitive marks the origin of something: departure or detachment from it.

Albanian

The ablative case is found in Albanian; it is the fifth case, rasa rrjedhore.

Sanskrit

In Sanskrit, the ablative case is the fifth case (pañcamī) and has a similar function to that in Latin. It is bound up with a special semantic condition, apādāna (अपादान) in Sanskrit. In fact, the fifth case (ablative) is the typical morphological realization of apādāna (Pāṇini 2.3.28).

Sanskrit nouns in this case often refer to a subject "out of" which or "from" whom something (an action, an object) has arisen or occurred: pátram dróḥ pátati "the leaf falls from the tree".

It is also used for nouns in several other senses, as for actions occurring "because of" or "without" a certain noun, indicating distance or direction. When it appears with a comparative adjective, (śreṣṭhatamam, "the best"), the ablative is used to refer to what the adjective is comparing: "better than X".

Armenian

The modern Armenian ablative has different markers for each main dialect, both originating from Classical Armenian. The Western Armenian affix -է -ē (definite -էն -ēn) derives from the classical singular; the Eastern Armenian affix -ից -ic’ (both indefinite and definite) derives from the classical plural. For both dialects, those affixes are singular, with the corresponding plurals being -(ն)երէ(ն) -(n)erē(n) and -(ն)երից -(n)eric’.